When everyone thought extrasensory perception had disappeared into the same embarrassing past as phrenology it came back with a vengeance. In a recent article by Daryl Bem titled Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect evidence was…

And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this…

I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months.
I stopped…

These installations (or more precisely drawings on the floor and ceiling) take advantage of our use of textures to perceive a third dimension/depth out of monocular cues. I'm curious how effective they are from different viewpoints. Perhaps there are some accidental views that make the texture…

There's a great blog called ionpsych being run by Dan Simons (of Invisible Gorilla fame). The posts are all by graduate students in a science writing for public consumption class. I'm glad people are starting to teach us overly technical scientists how to communicate in graduate school. I'm not…

Have I dominated you yet?
This is why I walk around staring at people - World Domination.
For the study, participants watched a computer screen while a series of colored ovals appeared. Below each oval were blue, green, and red dots; they were supposed to look away from the oval to the dot with…

Just in case you're looking for something to write on your course evaluations. Or perhaps you are the instructor and you hope you don't get something like this (especially if you are young!)
Via Texts From Last Night:
I had to do a class evaluation today & the girl beside me didn't fill in any…

-Via Eurekalert-
Los Angeles, CA (December 7, 2010) Most people feel chills and shivers in response to music that thrills them, but some people feel these chills often and others feel them hardly at all. People who are particularly open to new experiences are most likely to have chills in response…

Or is it a 'Holiday' miracle now? Anyway...
Finally, Congress passes a piece of legislation that citizens on both the right and left side of the political spectrum can get behind. Late yesterday, Congress approved the CALM (Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation) Act, which "requires TV…

Interesting...
More recent research has revealed that chimpanzees and even dogs can catch yawns from those around them, including from humans, but little is known about why we yawn and why it appears to be so infectious.
Psychologists at the University of Stirling, however, have now discovered…

Find out right here via the Christian Science Monitor:
For many years, the National Football League has given the Wonderlic aptitude test to rookie players. The test has 50 questions with a 12-minute time limit. Put three minutes on the clock and try our shortened version of the test, created with…

This (I guess?) accidental view of a San Francisco house really shows how steep the hills are. -Via BoingBoing-
"HÃ¥kan DahlstrÃ¶m got this delightful shot of one of San Francisco's steeper hills, turning his camera so that the road (and not the houses) were at level to convey the extent of the…

It seems that there are some cool pictures/film floating around showing some of the results of the wacky shit that the military did back in the day in order to win wars in some very very unconventional ways. Here's something NPR dug up:
The Army had a few periods of experimenting with LSD and…

Just to get you ready for tomorrow's sports post (are you smarter than a quarterback?)
Athletes' Experiences of the Psychological Effects of Poor Coaching
The purpose of this study was to describe the psychological effects of poor coaching reported by collegiate, professional and semi-professional…

This group can build a 3D model from millions of flickr images from any city/location/public restroom. Amazing!
Scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a method for creating 3D models of pretty much anything in pretty much no time.
Using a sexy algorithm and the…

I love creative design. Here begins a new theme on Omni Brain.
Do you only have a small cabinet and need to fit in as many drinking tools as possible? Do you want to get sticky booze all over your house? This is for you!
-via gizmodo-

Pagination

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As I write this, I'm told that there are eleven water cannon vehicles heading to the disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, to attempt to cool down nuclear material that is exposed and exuding (I dare not use the word "leaking" lest I be thought an alarmist) radiation at a rate that seems to be as alarming to the engineers and nuclear experts on the scene as it is assuaging to…

Prepare yourself.
The Te Papa Museum of New Zealand has a new specimen locked in a vault: a colossal squid that will be thawed and dissected (they think!) on streaming video.
Here is the necromantic chamber.
Wait! No protective runes, no array of emergency thuribles, no pentagram, no mysterious idols of jade and obsidian? This may not go well.